Hearthstone to Receive Renewed Attention from Blizzard

‘Hearthstone’ has turned into Blizzard’s calling card, pun completely intended, over the past several years and for good reason. The mobile/PC based cardgame has essentially given Blizzard an inside track into a world apart from their work on ‘World of Warcraft’. For fans that felt like the game was getting stale, the few that are out there complaining, they should worry no longer. It was recently announced that Blizzard is turning full tilt toward 2018 filled with expansion releases for the title.

Ben Thompson is the lead artist for Hearthstone and he went on the record with Metabomb in order to talk about what is to come in the series. Thompson said, “At this point, we feel it’s best to continue to add mission content to the actual release set for several reasons.” Thompson goes on to hint that three will be three major new expansions for the game coming up and each of them will be “full sets of cards with new missions in each.” While this is good news, there is some minor bad news to release — Adventures won’t be making a return to the franchise.

The reason that Adventures is getting sidelined, despite it upsetting some fans, is that the game-type fundamentally made the title imbalanced. Blizzard is paying close attention to how hard it is for newcomers to get into the game and be active, especially when there is already such a learning curve. Adventures essentially made that learning curve a little bit too difficult for Blizzard to be comfortable with. Thompson finished by saying, “For that reason, putting together three full releases with mission content is a big part of how we see the game going forwards.”

Peter Whalen, Senior Adviser for Hearthstone, was also present in the interview. Whalen made sure to focus on how important it was to continue bringing a diverse and interesting metagame to the new releases. With Whalen and Thompson both on the record , comfortable with the direction of the game, Hearthstone players should be too.